Spamming is an abuse of an electronic communications medium to initiate unsolicited communications in bulk. The most common type of spamming is sending email spam, which involves using email protocol(s) to send multiple identical messages to electronic mailboxes of numerous recipients. Estimated 70% of all email traffic can be characterized as spam. The spamming became especially widespread because of low costs of sending email messages. However, it imposes a significant burden on the Internet users, businesses and Internet service providers.
Spammers obtain email addresses of potential targets using, for example, web tools, which extract email addresses from web pages. The unsolicited email messages sent by email spammers most often contain commercial advertisements. Some spam messages may also include identity fraud content, which is called “phishing.”
A phishing email looks just like an email from the user's bank, or from a legitimate online business such as eBay or Amazon, or from another organization that the user should be able to trust. The email usually asks the user to click a link and verify information about the user's account. The link provided in the email leads the user to a site that looks real. If the unsuspecting user provides the requested information, it becomes compromised. In addition to spam and phishing emails, the user may also be exposed to various forms of “malware”, which includes computer viruses, spyware as well as other threats.
Various filtering techniques have been developed to combat threats present in email and web content. Most of those techniques are based on Bayesian filtering technology. Unfortunately, in order to be effective, the Bayesian filter needs to be extensively “trained” by the human user. However, in a home environment, the user may not wish to engage in such “training.” The home network user may desire a simple plug-and-play appliance, which would provide email and web content filtering capabilities without human intervention.
Therefore, the existing technology does not provide an integrated network protective solution for home use, which does not require extensive human interaction.